Brow raised, he asked, “Foxx, what are you smelling?”
The vampire blinked and looked at him. “What?”
“You keep sniffing the air and frowning. What are you smelling?”
Foxx’s frown deepened. “I…”
“What? What is it?”
The man tilted his head. “I think… Well…you remember how the poisons had different scents…”
“Did they?”
Foxx nodded.
Harlow honestly couldn’t remember. Well, with the vampire one he had been too focused on making sure that Foxx wouldn’t devolve into a crazed bloodsucker and die on him, and with the werewolf… He did remember that one. Mostly due to it being extremely bitter.
Harlow should probably start paying more attention to scents. Back when he’d been ‘human’, he hadn’t really been big on remembering smells… Mostly as they usually made him think of what people had done there…and what he could possibly be touching that he couldn’t see.
Okay, admitting that was now making him realize that his touch thing may be worse than he even knew…
“So, they smelled different… What about them?”
“I keep getting this strong waft of both of them. Maybe we are near an infection site?”
Harlow smirked. “Or…what if…rather than smelling an infection site, you are smelling the person who helped spread them both?”
Foxx’s head tilted the other way, a slow and slightly evil smile slipping onto his face. “The scent isn’t moving, and it is coming from the same direction each time… Yet…each time, it’s the same strength as before… If it were a location…the wind would be slowly diluting it.”
“Can’t dilute a smell when you are carrying a few cans of it with you.”
“That you can’t!”
“Perhaps they decided to stay and watch the chaos?”
“Or…maybe…” Foxx’s smile widened. “They were told to hang back to make sure things didn’t go wrong, and they got trapped in the city when it went into lockdown quicker than they’d assumed it would?”
“Both convenient, yet…unfortunate. As it probably means You Know Who knows what we are up to.”
“Well, if he knows, we might as well go say hi.” Foxx chuckled. “Come on.”
Foxx took off running, and he followed. “What exactly does the vampire one smell like?” he asked as he caught up.
“The vampire one smells like sour candy with a hint of decay, and in case you don’t remember, the werewolf one has an extremely bitter metallic-like scent. They are a distance away still. Not close enough for a heartbeat even. It’s why I kept smelling the air, because it kept coming and going, not constant.”
He took a deep breath in just as the wind blew. “I've caught the scents.”
Now that he did smell it, he realized the vampire one was familiar, and that he’d actually been smelling both scents for the last few minutes, just as Foxx had. Harlow just hadn’t realized what it meant, or even remembered the vampire one.
Compared to the bitterness of the werewolf poison…the sour candy smell of the vampire poison was a lot less noticeable and stinging. That it smelled of decay had probably made it even less likely that he’d remember it after that first time, because frankly, by this point, Harlow was pretty used to the smell.
As for the werewolf one, while he had remembered it, the bitterness was diluted due to the distance it had traveled, so again, Harlow had disregarded it. Which told him he needed to do better.
Following the scents, he and Foxx stumbled right into the human, neither his heartbeat nor his individual scent ever making itself known. It was as they burst around a corner into a dead-end alleyway, and voices started mid conversation, that he remembered how the last idiot of Maverick’s had hidden.
“I don’t know what they—” The blond-haired human cut off, his eyes going wide as he saw them.
“What?! You don’t know what?!” Maverick’s voice came out harshly from the phone the man held, each word practically a snarl.
